Archive for December, 2011

Hey, just got back from a lovely sketch-crawl with a handful of comics buddies at the MFA. What’s a sketch-crawl you ask? Why it’s a trip with a few friends to a locale that has interesting things to draw. It can be a roaming varied all day thing, this summer we took trips around Harvard Square or Waltham or something a little more sedentary like a trip to the Greek section of the MFA to look at and draw sculptures, a perfect location for a day as chillingly winter-like as we’ve had in nine months.
Things you need:

Have to say I’m a little disappointed with the MFA’s lack of seating in much of the exhibit rooms, though they didn’t seem to hassel us camped out on the floor. The art more than makes up for it though.

Thanks to Kimball, Andy, LB, and Ben, awesome day of drawing!

Here are a couple of my sketches.

Both are ink-pen on paper, I went straight to ink on these for the practice, no pencils. Also I picked the first one to focus on the folds, I’m working a lot on my drawing of cloth and fabrics these days so I gravitated toward the most sumptuous sculpture of cloth I could fine. Unfortunately she was missing an arm. Though as can be seen from the second sketch, doing much better than most of the figures in the wing.

Here is a new painting that I’ve been working on for quite some time. By quiet some time, I mean well over a year. It’s been a sort of back-burner type project but one I’ve spent many-a-sunday working on. I didn’t log my hours or anything but I imagine it’s well over a hundred. Work of this kind of detail only happens when I can tackle it a little bit at a time. I just don’t have the patience to noodle at things that need noodling day in and day out. It’s much more satisfying to take jabs at here and there, when my mood is more obsessive, my nervous moments, when the best way out is to go deep in and spend some time in there and slowly, very slowly build into something cohesive.

Like other work of this type, it started with something half-formed in my brain a twisting mass rolling around up there pushing at the edges looking for a way out. There’s a story here too of course, something dark, something dangerous, something with a lot of pink. I imagine my subconscious is tasting tidbits of different stories I’ve been hearing or reading lately, digesting chunks of imagery that my consciousness has passed right over. It’s something massive, something strange, something we hope we never see with our own eyes.

Anyway I hope you enjoy. I realized when making a version of this that was more web-friendly (a.k.a. not hundreds of megabytes) it had to get a lot smaller. And quite frankly I don’t want to limit my viewers to a few thousand pixels, it’s much more fun to get up a close and explore, so here’s a link to a high resolution version one a lot closer to the resolution at which I painted it.